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Saturday, 13 January 2018

Real Estate

In this country, nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with Donald Trump is more important than the crisis in Carillion. Someone needs to tell the BBC that.

And that Boris Johnson is on record that he no longer visits New York for fear of running into Donald Trump. And that Nigel Farage is not a significant figure. And that there is in fact a bit of a story about him, which is not his call for a second referendum. And that Jeremy Corbyn and Sadiq Khan are entitled to the right of reply.

4 comments:

Im crying with laughter at this “Nigel Farage is not a significant figure.” No, not at all. He’s only permanently changed the entire course of British politics by achieving a referendum and a vote to leave against all the mainstream Parliamentary parties and put Britain on course for a withdrawal from the EU that was unthinkable just 5 years ago.

Peter Oborne is right. There ought to be statues to Farage, the most influential figure of the last 30 years,

There’s have been no “leave campaign” nor any referendum at all without him. In the event he turned what looked like certain defeat into victory when Vote Leave came begging to him as it trailed in the polls, and he told them to focus on immigration, the moment the campaign transformed its fortunes.

He never called for a second referendum yesterday. He made his views clear in his Telegraph column that day if you read it (“I never wanted a second referendum but we have to be prepared for one”).

As the excellent Peter Oborne wrote on why Nigel Farage is the fourth most influential political figure of the last 30 years.

“”By my estimate, only three politicians have made a genuine, enduring difference to Britain in the past 50 years. First, there was Roy Jenkins, Labour’s Home Secretary in the Sixties. He was regarded as the father of the Permissive Society — legalising homosexuality, abolishing hanging, ending censorship, reforming abortion and divorce laws.

Then there was Edward Heath, the Tory prime minister in the Seventies who negotiated Britain’s entry into the nascent European Union (then misleadingly known as the Common Market).

Third was Margaret Thatcher, the greatest prime minister of the post-war period. She destroyed the power of the over-mighty trade unions, yanked the economy off its knees and restored national pride. We’re still benefiting from her foresight and bravery.

Now, in the aftermath of Brexit, we can add Nigel Farage as a fourth change-maker. I believe future historians will consider him as significant as Roy Jenkins and a bigger figure than Heath.

Consider the facts: David Cameron would never have called a referendum on Britain’s EU membership but for Farage and the fear of losing votes to Ukip.”